


The Aftermath Of Love

by AlyssiaInWonderland



Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: Angst, Depression, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Isolation, Multi, Poverty, Self-Harm, Sex, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 11:59:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14188506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlyssiaInWonderland/pseuds/AlyssiaInWonderland
Summary: It's some years after the end of RENT. Everyone is gone. Mark is alone.He tries to cope, and fails, until he starts to succeed.





	The Aftermath Of Love

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so most of the trigger warnings should be in the tags but I wanted to make it clear that the sex that happens in this, while technically consensual, didn't really come from a place where Mark is able to make healthy decisions, so it walks a very grey area. He pursues the encounters, however. So. Feel free to decide to avoid this or not based on that. First and foremost look after yourselves ok my darlin's <3

It hits him in waves. He’ll be getting out his camera, or writing the start of the script introductions to a short video piece, and suddenly he remembers that Joanne was the one who got him this job in the first place. He’ll be at his apartment and he sees the place where Mimi drew words on the window, or think he’s seeing Roger with his guitar for a second where his heart leaps before it falls, bruised, to the dusty floorboards.

Sometimes, he feels like he is made of raw nerves and sharp edges that are wrapped in a single-minded determination to never go numb despite how much it bleeds and tries to scar. He’s clinging to his memories so tightly his mind is growing white with tension and static, and he thinks that it’s easier to regret nothing and live in the present when the present is painted with friendship than it is when it’s washed in rain and isolation. He grips his hands in on themselves, curling his fingers into his palms to hold onto his gloves and shivering through the nights, wishing for someone to share the cold and his warmth. He can feel the ghosts of his friends in the space next to him where the old mattress has collapsed under months of the bird-light weight of fading existence.

He can’t sleep, and money is so tight he doesn’t eat much either. Benny’s compassion hasn’t grown with loss, and his parents are worried, leaving biting message after biting message. He can’t stomach seeing their concerned, well-meaning faces. Every time he hears the unspoken ‘I told you they would all leave you’ and bile rises in his throat, bitter and scorchingly acidic. Tears come sometimes, but not often enough to quell the rising storm of emotion inside his empty husk of a body. He aches for some kind of feeling, a connection, anything to remind him that today even exists. 

He’s long since reconciled the fact that he doesn’t feel attraction the same way others do; he’s even reconciled that he doesn’t know if he doesn’t feel romantic love or if he was simply in love with all his friends instead. He thinks he’ll never know, and that seems worse than the ill-defined tangle in his head of just what his identity even is. It’s as if everything about him is frozen, stopped in a timeless tableau while he struggles to find anything to tie him back down to reality. He’s slipped out of sync with the rest of the world and nothing is vivid or real – even the cold is more distant than the echoes of Angel singing or Collins’ laugh.

The first time he goes home with someone else, it’s by accident. He feels their arms brush at the bar where he sits, watching the alcohol with hungry eyes because he can’t afford any drinks, and he stammers through the explanation that he can’t pay her, that he’s here because he knew Mimi. She smiles at him softly and offers to buy him a drink. On an empty stomach it doesn’t take long for him to feel dizzy, for the sparks of need and warmth at the feeling of skin touching skin to consume him. 

They end up at her place, in the back of the club, and she seems to read his need to simply feel because she takes his wrists and clicks on the handcuffs. Between that and the blindfold, his world and perception is narrowed enough that things start to feel real again. He moans as she strokes his body, fingers trailing across his skin and lighting him up with sensation. It’s too ill-defined to be purely pleasure, but it’s something other than blankness and so he arches up into it, chasing the feeling until it’s overwhelming him with its not-quite-rightness. She kisses him and he hates it as much as he loves it and he rises up into it anyway, whimpering in some kind of desperation. She soothes him, crooning gentle words of comfort that have him dissolving into himself, fragments spilling out as tears that dampen the blindfold and never make it onto his cheeks.

He feels her wrapping a condom over him and then her mouth is on him, and he cries out softly, brokenly, and his head is filled with images and sounds and he can smell Maureen’s lemon-lye soap and see Joanne’s confident smirk and he’s coming and he can’t tell if he’s sobbing with his release or the memories so real he thinks he could touch them.

She releases him from the handcuffs and he quietly refuses to let her remove the blindfold, instead using soft strokes of his fingers to tip her over the edge and holds her shoulder tight until his hands have stopped shaking. She rewards him with a grin and another kiss as she removes the blindfold, and doesn’t seem to notice that the cloth is still a little damp.

After he’s gone home, still a little dizzy and tasting salt on his lips from her skin and his tears, he can’t stop thinking about it. He can’t tell if he’s repulsed or relieved when he decides he’s going to do it again. It feels a bit like falling, and the tiny thrill of feeling when he determines to head to another bar is worth the muddle of screaming in his head.

The next person is a man, and he’s gruff and possibly thinks Mark is a hooker, but he can’t bring himself to care. He makes a sarcastic comment when the guy – wearing a suit – buys him a drink, and after that it’s almost like he’s become another person, leaning in just right and wrapping his fingers around his slightly threadbare tie, drawing him in and licking into his mouth, relishing the knot in his stomach because it feels like he’s actually present at long last, and if to exist in the today he needs this mouth on his and skin on his then it’s worth it no matter what.

They wind up in the man’s apartment, on the edges of reputable quarters, and he thinks he manages to be glad that some people can find a way up the steep slope away from being broken. He’s feeling slightly weak, his body sliding to the floor a little too quickly, but he distracts his new companion by fumbling on the condom and swallowing him down. It feels strangely powerful, holding a cock in his mouth, and he experiments with the energy he has left, humming and riding out the resulting buck of his hips. He can’t breathe properly and his eyes are streaming with tears, and he’s glad that this is expected in this act because he’s not sure how much of it is physical limits and how much is the strange emotions that rise in him whenever he does this. His lips are stretched wide and he’s thinking of Roger’s hands which ruffle his hair gently where this man is gripping tight, of Collins and his gentle moans when he drinks tea that he loves, and everything hurts in a scalding white and black storm of spots across his vision before the man pulls out of his mouth and he’s left gasping and bereft.

He holds the dirty notes of cash in his hand as he stumbles back to his apartment, wipes his face and mouth and returns to work, an itch beneath his skin like he’s awoken a thirst that he’s quenching each time with gasoline.

He loses track of who he ends up with, after that. They’re all the same, warmth and the smell of latex and the urgent need to feel some kind of friction, while he wrestles with the combination of want and disgust at himself. They’re mapped onto his body in flashes of pleasure and absent horror, mingled with hot, brightly coloured snatches of his friends, gone where he can’t follow them. The first time he’s fucked, he thinks of Angel, his consciousness twisting into the pleasure-pain, the fiery burn bringing him closer and closer to her until he thinks he can feel her body up against his, sees her throat bared as she throws back her head and grinds against him in her provocative dance of joy and shared kindness like she did when they first met. He’s captivated and desperate, reaching out to hold her and finding only the body of the man over him. The harsh, choked cries ripping out of his mouth sound enough like pleasure that the man fucking him finishes in moments, slipping out of him and leaving him in a haze of still-wanting because Angel is retreating now, fading with the sensation and only leaving a bitter aftertaste of unassuaged need.

He hasn’t slept in his apartment in weeks, and he’s thinking about just not bothering to lease it out again. But when he returns, to take stock of his possessions and wonder if he should let himself tumble fully into this painful obsession that’s trying to consume him, the place is just as filled with ghosts and memories as ever. He can’t let this place go, because it’s the only thing that feels even a fraction as real as when he’s clinging to another body and chasing the fleeting pleasure of orgasm.

He hears the beeping of the answerphone, and it’s the reminder of why he chose to stay here in the first place that makes him finally collapse against the wooden floorboards. His knees strike the hard floor and he knows it’s only adding layers on the bruising, and the heat is leeched out of his hands as his fingertips scrape against the rough planks. The layers of dust over the wood are stained dark in droplets as his tears soak into it, the moisture spreading a little across the grain of the wood, and his chest and back heaves with the sobs wrenching their way out of him. His arms start to give out under the pressure of supporting half his weight, his toes digging into the floor and his thighs trembling with strain. He scrabbles inelegantly to his mattress and slumps against it, the tears drying and leaving emptiness in their wake. His eyes flutter shut and he hopes they won’t open again.

The world still exists when he opens his eyes, and he’s never hated the relentlessness of existence more than he does right now. Even sitting up feels like too much, sending the world skittering away from him for a moment before his vision returns. He knows what’s happening. He’s seen it before. He’s too alone and too tired and too hungry and cold, and his body is starting to give up like his mind already has.

He manages to stand, and he gathers his camera to him, the weight of it pressing down on him as he stumbles down the stairs and out into the first flakes of snow. He blinks at them distantly, feels the hot-cold spark as fleck after fleck lands on patches of bare skin and sears into him. He hears himself bark a humourless laugh, and he sits on the steps into his apartment, watching the snow slowly coat the word around him, hiding the grime and blood and struggle until it’s blanketed in pristine beauty. By the time he rouses himself again, his shivering is starting to fade and his hair and shoulders are coated in a thick layer of snow. He doesn’t bother brushing it off, instead standing and absently turning the crank on his camera as he turns a full circle, capturing the rare, undisturbed look as he thinks for the first time of something incendiary that it takes a coating of something that could mean death to make the streets palatable to a rich audience. He feels words of bitter indictment swirling to the top of his head in a spinning carousel of thought, reality beginning to rush back as the cold tingles at his limbs.

He watches the sun bleeding over the rooftops and keeps filming, feeling the warmth of the dawn on his face and feeling returning to his face and fingers. Hot tears are streaming over his face, and he walks the perimeter of the streets, recording the stunning beauty as his mind spits out an accusatory narration that he thinks he might be able to fall in love with.

He watches through his camera lens, and movement catches his eye, snow shifting and falling in powdery streaks. He puts down the camera and hastens as fast as his cold limbs will carry him towards the movement. He grabs what seems to be an arm and pulls at it, putting all his weight into it. He falls into the snow, cushioning his landing as a man in a coat rises up out of the snow, blinking at him.

“You alright there, sweetheart?” Mark asks, though he knows the answer. “What did they do to you?” He sees blood on the snow, and for the first time in what seems like forever, he reaches out to someone.

“They mugged me. Didn’t have the heart to tell ‘em I don’t got a thing worth taking.” The man rasps out the words, and takes Mark’s offered hand.

“Here,” Mark slings the camera around his shoulder and grips the man’s arm, helping him up as well as he can. “Let’s get you inside.”

 They make it up the stairs, and Mark deposits the man on the mattress, dragging the bin and piles of slightly damp papers over to him along with a lighter. The man seems confused, and Mark isn’t sure if it’s because of the cold or the kindness he’s being offered.

“Why are you doing this?” He asks, and Mark can feel his eyes on him as he starts arranging the room, pausing to breathe every so often. Mark shrugs.

“Today, I have enough for both of us. Tomorrow, maybe someone’ll help me. Either way, I’ve been frozen for too long to let you stay out there when I can help.” Mark says the words though he knows they don’t make a great deal of sense.

“That’s quite something, if you ask me. Which you didn’t.” The man pauses, drawing a painful breath. “I’m Travis. And what should I call you? Seem like an angel to me.”  
  
Mark starts, nearly dropping the hot water he’s carrying in a mug over to the man. “I’m not Angel. I’m Mark.” He hands over the water, sensation almost blistering in his hands from the heat of the mug.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend.” The man is watching him as if he’ll take away the help at any instant, and Mark sighs.

“I knew an Angel, once. She died, of AIDS.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t-“  
  
“It’s okay. Or, it’s not. But we’re all living with something.” Mark smiles then, and it’s twisted and it doesn’t quite fit onto his face anymore, but it’s something, too. “I’ve gotta get to work, Travis. You can still be here when I get back, if you want.”

Mark picks up his bag and camera, and pauses at the door, the frame pressing painfully against his fingers as he takes several deep breaths to prepare for the stairs. He closes his eyes for a moment. The sunrise is imprinted on the backs of his eyelids, and he feels the life of this man carefully tying itself onto his. He realises, then, that perhaps he left for this place because of his family and because of his pride, because he wanted to not be living a lie. But he’s stayed because he’s needed. And maybe that’s enough to keep him going, at least for today.

As he walks down the stairs, the click of the door closing echoes in his mind along with the voices of his friends.

 

_There's only now_

_There's only here_

_Give in to love_

_Or live in fear_

_No other path_

_No other way_

_No day but today_

**Author's Note:**

> So. My brain needed to write something feelsy. This just sort of happened. I hope it's enjoyable and the lightening of the tone at the end is resonant.
> 
> AS ever, comments and kudos feed my dark soul! I put a lot of myself into this even though it's short, so yeah.


End file.
